In today's society, mobile devices are becoming increasingly more common. Many mobile devices, such as personal digital assistants, cellular phones, or the like, may be employed to communicate messages with another computing device, such as a desktop computer, a server, or the like. Moreover, users of such mobile devices may seek to obtain news, mail services, movies, music, or any of a variety of content over the Internet.
In a typical network configuration, a mobile device may communicate with various content/service providers through a mobile carrier's gateway device. As more mobile devices are used, however, the mobile carrier may need to add more gateway devices, or configure the gateway devices that they may currently employ. Information about such changes to the mobile carrier's services may be provided to the content/service providers. However, not all of the content/service providers may be information of new gateway devices that have entered service. In other instances, some of the content/service providers may not be provided such information for a period of time.
Because mobile devices may require modification of the content provided to them, including, for example, a rate in which the content might be provided, or the like, it is often relevant to the content/service providers to know whether a request is from a mobile device, or from another computing devices, such as a server, desktop computer, or similar land-based computing device.
A typical method in which a content/service provider knows whether a request is from a mobile device is based on a network address of the mobile carrier's gateway device. However, when the gateway device is unknown to the content/service provider, perhaps because it was reconfigured, or recently added by the mobile carrier service, the content/service provider may be unable to determine if the request is from a mobile device. Therefore, the content/service provider may be unable to adequately provide content in response to the request. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.